Auralog's TELL ME MORE Language Learning Software Review

TELL ME MORE is possibly the most feature packed language course that we have reviewed so far—It just feels huge. TELL ME MORE is an extremely impressive and sophisticated looking piece of kit: it is full of graphics, photographs, soundbites and videos and its speech recognition software is very possibly the best on the market. It does an excellent job of picking up on the tonal mistakes made when speaking chinese words and can even show you how to form the words, using diagrams, if you are having difficulty. The resulting sound into the microphone can then be displayed as a voice pattern alongside the native speaker's for comparison.

As well as a pronunciation aid, TELL ME MORE boasts a very impressive dialogue section that begins with various images of objects and actions, and questions based on these images. You respond to each question by choosing the most appropriate response to match the image and repeating it into the microphone. The questions become more difficult as the level progresses and the basic 'question and answer' situations become more like regular conversations.

There are also other exercises within the TELL ME MORE software to build different skills: Word association games, gapfills, mystery phrases, word order exercises, dictation, and crossword puzzles can be excellent activities to help you remember the vocabulary and develop your listening and reading skills.

There are three learning modes to choose from within the TELL ME MORE language software depending on your preference and learning style. These are:

Free-to-roam - Choose whatever activity and topic you want

Guided mode - Takes you through lessons one at a time but allow you to choose topics and exercises

Dynamic Mode - The program takes a stronger role in deciding the lesson and topic order that best suits your stated goals and your performance and can be a great help in planning and scheduling lesson times and learning pace.

TELL ME MORE is an extremely well put together language learning software package that allows you to learn a language in its entirety while still remaining fun and interesting. There are few products available that allow you to advance in speaking, listening, reading, and writing a language all at the same time, doing the same activities—TELL ME MORE's effectiveness at teaching each of these is top draw. The quality of the pronunciation section is so high that even the poorest of linguists couldn't fail, with enough effort, to sound like a native. Hearing your own voice speaking a word for the first time is often a startlingly blunt lesson of how bad you sound and slowly changing it to match that of a recorded native speaker perfects your spoken word.

The dialogue section was my mostly used part of the course. This started off slowly and I was worried for a time that I was going to lose interest as the questions seemed so basic, but after time the questions became more situation based and probably more appropriate for everyday usage; eventually you find yourself having basic conversations with the computer through the microphone. I did like the way each answer was written in Chinese and Pinyin script and an English translation could be found for every single word by hovering over it allowing a look at the grammatical construction. Once you get used to it, the dialogue portion of the software is actually very effective and allows you to recognise questions, form a correct response, and check your pronunciation at the same time.

The other sections of the TELL ME MORE software seem almost peripheral in comparison and consist of workbook like school exercises. However they can be very useful for checking vocabulary retention and, if done rigorously, will help to gain a more rounded understanding of the grammar, and better sentence construction.

It has to be said, TELL ME MORE is probably not the easiest piece of language software in the world to use. It is full of options which make it very user controllable, but also rather complicated and confusing. To be fair, a user can go through the software without ever having to get involved with all the options but of course they will lose some control.

The main page of the program is laid out like a film set with each piece of equipment being the link to a particular section e.g. clapperboard - dialogue section. This is fairly easy to use and the navigation bar at the bottom is also reasonably intuitive. However the overall feel of TELL ME MORE does sometimes seem cluttered and difficult to use.

Tell Me More is very expensive—it is at the top end of the most expensive language programs available. However it does have surprising value for money. There is a an immense amount of information in the software package and enough lesson hours to keep you busy for a very long time. I can imagine that the work that has gone into the production of this product is very high and that warrants a reasonably high asking price. The speech recognition software alone is almost worth the money.

The reason I didnt give Tell Me More a lower score for cost is that even though the one-off price for the package is higher than most, it does include enough material to take a student to advanced level so only one purchase is necessary while most other programs require you to buy level 2, level 3 and so on. Similarly priced products often sell their 'comprehensive' packages at twice the cost of Tell Me More.